Liam is six years old. He is Canada’s youngest medical marijuana user.

The day before Liam began using marijuana, he had 67 violent seizures, each lasting three to four minutes. In the 10 days after he began using it, he had one small seizure. He was riding horses, going on boat rides, and doing all the regular stuff you’d hope a six year-old gets to do. Google him. He gives the Jerry Maguire kid a run for his money.

Despite the US government’s nearly century-long prohibition of the plant, cannabis is nonetheless one of the most investigated therapeutically active substances in history. To date, there are over 20,000 published studies or reviews in the scientific literature referencing the cannabis plant and its cannabinoids, nearly half of which were published within the last five years according to a keyword search on PubMed Central, the US government repository for peer-reviewed scientific research. Over 1,450 peer-reviewed papers were published in 2013 alone. (By contrast, a keyword search of “hydrocodone,” a commonly prescribed painkiller, yields just over 600 total references in the entire body of available scientific literature.)